THE MASSACRE AT EL MOZOTE
A Parable of the Cold War
By Mark Danner
Illustrated. 304 pages.
Vintage Books/Random House. Paperback, $12.

In December of 1981 in El Salvador, twenty-one months after the murder
of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in San Salvador and twelve months after
the murder of the four American Maryknoll women outside San Salvador and
eleven months after the murder of the head of the Salvadoran land-reform
agency and two of his American aides at the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador,
which is to say at a time when the government of the United States had
already demonstrated the ability to tolerate grave insults to its Central
American policy, certain events occurred in certain remote villages north
of the Torola river in Morazï¿½n province. In what has since become the
most familiar of those villages, El Mozote, the events in question began
late on a Thursday afternoon, December 10, a time when the village was
crowded with refugees from areas believed less safe, and were concluded
at dawn on Saturday.

Later that day, in Los Toriles, two kilometers to the southeast, similar
events occurred, as similar events had already occurred or would within
a few hours occur in Arambala and La Joya and Jocote Amarillo and Cerro
Pando and Joateca and La Rancherï¿½a. These events were later and variously
described to Mark Danner by the two American embassy officials assigned
to investigate them, Todd Greentree and Major John McKay, as "something
bad," "something horrible," a case in which "there
had probably been a massacre, that they had lined people up and shot them,"
a case in which "abuses against the civilian population probably
took place"; a case that presented as its most urgent imperative
the need to craft a report that would "have credibility among people
who were far away and whose priorities were?you know, we're talking about
people like Tom Enders?whose priorities were definitely not necessarily
about getting at exactly what happened."

On December 10, 1992, eleven years to the day after the commencement
of what has become known as the Mozote massacre (the largest number of
those killed on that long December weekend were killed during the thirty-six
hours spent by members of the Salvadoran army's Atlacatl Battalion in
El Mozote), four American forensic experts submitted to the United Nations
Truth Commission the results of their analysis of skeletal remains and
artifacts recovered by a team of Argentinian forensic anthropologists
originally assembled to reconstruct evidence of their own country's dirty
war. Working exclusively with material exhumed from what had been the
sacristy of the Mozote church, the Americans were able to identify the
bones of 143 human beings, 136 of whom were children and adolescents.
Of the remaining seven adults, six were women, one in the third trimester
of pregnancy. The average age of the children was six.

The report prepared for the United Nations noted that there may have
been a greater number of deaths in the sacristy, which was one of several
sites mentioned by survivors as places where bodies would be found, since
"many young infants may have been entirely cremated" (much of
the village had been burned before the Atlacatl left El Mozote) and "other
children may not have been counted because of extensive fragmentation
of body parts." Of the ten officers who, according to the report
prepared for the United Nations, commanded the units participating in
the Morazï¿½n operation, three are now dead, and four are still serving
in the Salvadoran army. None has been officially charged on any count
related to the massacre.

A year before, Tutela Legal, the human rights office of the Archbishopric
of San Salvador, had compiled what may be the final and most comprehensive
list of all those known or believed to have died in El Mozote and the
surrounding villages. The Tutela Legal list numbered 767 men, women, and
children, the youngest the two-day-old grandson of a day laborer named
Miguel Mï¿½rquez (the grandfather was also killed, as were his son, his
daughter-in-law, two of his daughters, and seven of his other grandchildren),
the oldest a man named Leoncio Dï¿½az, who was said to be 105 years old
and to have had a 100-year-old companion named Leoncia Mï¿½rquez, who was
also killed. Of the 767 victims cited on the Tutela Legal list, 358 were
infants and children under the age of thirteen.

This of course is not a new story, and the
fact that it is not a new story is in many ways the point of Mark Danner's
dispassionate, meticulously documented, and for these reasons conclusive
book, The Massacre at El Mozote. The essential facts of the Mozote massacre
were published on January 27, 1982, on the front pages of both The New
York Times and The Washington Post, accompanied by photographs taken by
Susan Meiselas, who had walked into Morazï¿½n from Honduras with Raymond
Bonner of the Times. Bonner reported seeing the charred skulls and bones
of what appeared to him to be several dozen men, women, and children.
Allowing that it was "not possible for an observer who was not present
at the time of the massacre to determine independently how many people
died or who killed them," he reported that the surviving relatives
and friends of the victims believed the dead to number 733 and the killing
to have been done "by uniformed soldiers" during an Atlacatl
sweep of the region.

Alma Guillermoprieto, who was then a stringer for The Washington Post
and who entered Mozote a few days after Bonner and Meiselas had left,
also reported seeing bodies and body parts and quoted the same survivors,
as well as the Salvadoran ambassador to Washington, Ernesto Rivas Gallont,
who dismissed the reports from Morazï¿½n as the "type of story that
leads us to believe there is a plan," the plan being either to derail
the Salvadoran election scheduled for March 1982 or "to take credit
away from the certification President Reagan must make to Congress."
This "certification," during 1982 and 1983 a semiannual requirement
for continued aid to El Salvador, involved asserting that its government
was "making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally
recognized human rights" and was "achieving substantial control
over all elements of its own armed forces, so as to bring to an end the
indiscriminate torture and murder of Salvadoran citizens by these forces."

The Reagan administration made its certification to these points on January
28, 1982, the day after Bonner's and Alma Guillermoprieto's extensive
reports from Morazï¿½n appeared in the Times and the Post. Mark Danner's
true subject in The Massacre at El Mozote, then, is not the massacre itself
but the way in which the story of the massacre, which was carried out
by troops trained by the US Special Forces and equipped with US manufactured
M-16s and with ammunition manufactured for the US government at Lake City,
Missouri, came to be known and discounted in the United States, the way
in which the story of El Mozote "was exposed to the light and then
allowed to fall back into the dark."

Reports that something bad had happened
in Morazï¿½n began to circulate almost immediately. The Reverend William
L. Wipfler at the New York office of the National Council of Churches
first heard the story from a contact at Socorro Jurï¿½dico, which was then
the legal aid office of the Archbishopric of San Salvador. Wipfler left
a message for Raymond Bonner at the Mexico City bureau of the Times, and
also sent a cable, dated December 15, 1981, asking Ambassador Deane Hinton
in San Salvador for "confirmation or otherwise" of "reliable
reports received here [indicating] that between December 10 and 13 a government
joint military and security forces operation took place in Morazï¿½n Department
which resulted in over 900 civilian deaths."

Hinton did not reply until January 8, by which time the guerrillas' Radio
Venceremos was back in operation (to at least temporarily knock out the
Venceremos transmitter had been one goal, perhaps the single successfully
realized goal, of the Atlacatl's Morazï¿½n operation) and broadcasting a
detailed account of the massacre from a survivor named Rufina Amaya. Rufina
Amaya had witnessed the killing of her husband and four of her children,
ages nine, five, three, and eight months, but in the confusion and terror
of the event had been inadvertently overlooked as the soldiers corralled
groups of struggling and screaming women, many of them torn from their
infants and children, to be killed and then burned.

"I do not know what your sources are but the only sources that I
have seen alleging something like this are clandestine Radio Venceremos
reports," Hinton's January 8 cable to the National Council of Churches
read in part. "Frankly, I do not consider Radio Venceremos to be
a reliable source." Since Radio Venceremos did not restore its ability
to broadcast until well after the National Council of Churches query was
sent, that Hinton would devote an extraordinary ten of this cable's twelve
paragraphs to illustrations of Radio Venceremos unreliability seems in
retrospect to suggest a certain crisis of confidence, if not a panic,
at the embassy.

In fact, definitely before January 8 and probably closer to mid-December,
Todd Greentree, then a junior reporting officer at the embassy in San
Salvador and now the desk officer for Nicaragua at the State Department,
had relayed to Hinton not only a report from his own sources on the left
about a massacre in Morazï¿½n but also an offer from the FMLN to guide Greentree
there. "I knew the guerrillas would never have masqueraded something
like this, would never have fabricated it, if they were offering safe-conduct,"
Greentree told Danner. "I was convinced that something had gone on,
and that it was bad. I mean, it was pretty clear, if they were going to
do this, that something must have happened."

Hinton's decision was that Greentree could not go in under guerrilla
protection. "I should emphasize that Inever got the feeling that
they just wanted this to go away," Greentree told Danner about the
meeting in which this decision was taken. "But there were political
and military restraints that we were operating under." What discussion
there may have been of an independent investigation (at least ten of the
fifty-five American military advisers Congress then allowed in El Salvador
were assigned to the Atlacatl) is unknown, although Danner was told by
one of the advisers assigned to the Atlacatl that someone from the embassy
Milgroup (Military Advisory Group) had called the Atlacatl base at La
Libertad a few days after the massacre "and talked to the Special
Forces people and told them they wanted Monterrosa [Lt. Col. Domingo Monterrosa
Barrios, the Atlacatl commander] to come in?they wanted to talk to him
about something that had happened during the operation."

Monterrosa had declined to come in, a suggestive illustration of the
level of control the United States then had over the military forces it
was funding. Whether or not the embassy decision to refuse the FMLN offer
to guide Greentree to the site of the massacre was discussed with Washington
also remains shrouded in the subjunctive. "However much we might
have wanted more information, no one in State was going to make that call,"
Danner was told by Peter Romero, at the time of Mozote an El Salvador
specialist at the State Department.

Most of the interested players, then, knew
about Morazï¿½n, in outline if not in detail, well before January 6, when
Bonner and Susan Meiselas, followed a few days later by Alma Guillermoprieto,
first walked into El Mozote. Not until January 30, however, three days
after the story had appeared on the front pages of the Times and the Post,
did the embassy dispatch Todd Greentree and Major John McKay, who was
then in the defense attachï¿½'s office at the embassy and is now a colonel
attached to NATO in Brussels, to Morazï¿½n. Greentree and McKay did not
exactly get to El Mozote, although they did fly over it. Greentree's impression
from the air was that "El Mozote had been pretty much destroyed."

Once on the ground in Morazï¿½n, Greentree and McKay, accompanied by a
squad of the Atlacatl, interviewed those residents of the northern villages
who had reached the refugee camp outside San Francisco Gotera. Although
the Americans later recalled being able to "observe and feel this
tremendous fear," they did not elicit eyewitness accounts of a massacre,
nor had they expected to. "You had a bunch of very intimidated, scared
people, and now the Army presence further intimidated them," McKay
told Danner. "I mean, the Atlacatl had supposedly done something
horrible, and now these gringos show up under this pretense of investigating
it, but in the presence of these soldiers. It was probably the worst thing
you could do. I mean, you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know
what the Army people were there for." Greentree and McKay then set
out for El Mozote, and got to within an hour's walk of what had been the
village before the Atlacatl soldiers accompanying them refused to go further.
"In the end, we went up there and we didn't want to find that anything
horrible had happened," McKay told Danner. "And the fact that
we didn't get to the site turned out to be very detrimental to our reporting?the
Salvadorans, you know, were never very good about cleaning up their shell
casings."

That evening, back at the embassy in San Salvador, Greentree wrote a
report, the overriding aim of which appears to have been "credibility,"
summarizing his and McKay's findings. Here is the point at which El Mozote
entered the thin air of policy. "The end of Bob White's tour, and
the transition period before Hinton arrived [Robert White had preceded
Hinton as ambassador], and the first six months of Hinton's tour?those
were the absolute worst days, really out of control," Greentree told
Danner by way of explaining why the conviction that what was known or
suspected in country would not be "credible" in Washington had
by then increased exponentially. "And the fact that Bob White and
everybody in the Embassy had been so thoroughly traumatized by the murders
of the nuns, and the AFL-CIO guys [the two Americans who were killed with
the head of the Salvadoran land-reform agency at the Sheraton in San Salvador],
and just the general sort of out-of-control way the military was?it meant
that everything we reported could be taken as suspect."

The following day, after review and revisions, Greentree's report went
to the State Department over Hinton's name. This was the cable containing
the careful and soon to be repeated assertions that it was "not possible
to prove or disprove excesses of violence against the civilian population
of El Mozote by government troops" and that "no evidence could
be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians
in the operation zone, nor that the number of civilians killed even remotely
approached number being cited in other reports circulating internationally."
The Greentree cable also contained, deep in its text, a curious warning
from one of the interviewees, the mayor of Jocoaitique, who according
to the cable "intimated that he knew of violent fighting in El Mozote"
but was "unwilling to discuss deportment of government troops"
and who then made a comment so coded that it could stand as a veiled but
exact _expression of the embassy position on what did or did not take
place in Morazï¿½n. What the cable quoted the mayor of Jocoaitique as having
said to Todd Greentree and Major McKay was this: "This is something
one should talk about in another time, in another country."

That part of the embassy cable did not make
it into the statement made two days later to the House Subcommittee on
Western Hemisphere Affairs by Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American
Affairs Thomas O. Enders. (Nor would it appear in the sanitized version
of the cable released under the Freedom of Information Act to Raymond
Bonner in 1983.)[1] The Enders statement is arresting not only for what
it says and does not say but for its tone, which suggests an extreme version
of a kind of exaggerated hauteur commonly translated as entitlement in
the northeastern United States. "Many of you have read," he
said, addressing what he called "special pleading" in the matter
of death and disappearance statistics, "about something called the
Legal Aid Office of the Archbishopric?Socorro Judico [sic] is its Spanish
name; it is often cited in the international media. It strangely lists
no victims of guerrilla and terrorist violence. Apparently they do not
commit violence."

This was a level of seigneurial dismissal often emulated but never quite
mastered by Jeane Kirkpatrick and Elliott Abrams and other regular defenders
of administration policy in Central America. "There is another organization,
the Central American University, that collects statistics too," Enders
continued, referring to UCA, the Jesuit Josï¿½ Simeï¿½n Caï¿½as University of
Central America. "Its bias may be apparent from the fact that it
does include a category of persons killed by what I believe Congressman
Bonker referred to as paramilitary organizations. And they are called
in Spanish ajusticiados, referring to persons that have received justice
at the hands of their executioners." Only then did Enders turn his
attention to what he described as "allegations" of massacres,
including Mozote. "We sent two embassy officers down to investigate
the reports," Enders said, inadvertently illuminating the particular
distance between Washington and Morazï¿½n, which in local usage is said
to be not "down" but "up" from San Salvador. Enders
continued:

It is clear from the report they gave that there has been a confrontation
between

the guerrillas occupying Mozote and attacking Government forces last
December. There is no evidence to confirm that Government forces systematically
massacred civilians in the operations zone, or that the number of civilians
remotely approached the 733 or 926 victims cited in the press. I note
they asked people how many people there were in that canton and were
told probably not more than 300 in December, and there are many survivors
including refugees now.

Enders said this on February 2. On February 1, however, Deane Hinton,
in response to what he apparently construed as careless use of his reply
to the National Council of Churches, had sent a corrective cable to the
State Department. This cable read in part:

I would be grateful if department would use extreme care in describing
my views on alleged massacre. Case in point is description in para 3
of REFTEL referring to my letter?as "denying the incident."
My letter did not "deny" incident: it reported that at that
time I had no confirmation and argued from available evidence from Radio
Venceremos and from lack of other reports that I had no reason to believe
Venceremos reports. I still don't believe Venceremos version but additional
evidence strongly suggests that something happened that should not have
happened and that it is quite possible Salvadoran military did commit
excesses. Allegations that it was unit from Atlacatl battalion in El
Mozote remain to be confirmed or discredited.

Several days later, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and
Humanitarian Affairs Elliott Abrams echoed Enders in his statement to
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The El Mozote case was, Abrams
said, "a very interesting one in a sense." ("Interesting"
was at the time a word much in use, as were "strange" and "unusual."
Enders for example had noted that Socorro Jurï¿½dico "strangely lists
no victims of guerrilla and terrorist violence." I recall watching
Jeane Kirkpatrick during this period whip an audience to a frenzy with
little silken whips of innuendo as she described how "interested,"
even "bemused," she was by the "unusual standards,"
the "extraordinarily, even uniquely demanding standards" imposed
by the certification requirement.) The reason El Mozote was "interesting"
to Abrams was this:

?because we found, for
example, that the numbers, first of all, were not credible,

because as Secretary Enders notes, our information was that there were
only three hundred people in the canton.

Abrams went on to wonder why a massacre that had occurred in mid-December,
if indeed a massacre had occurred at all, had not been "publicized"
until late January.

Ten years later, in an interview, Abrams was asking the same question,
to the same innuendo: "If it had really been a massacre and not a
firefight, why didn't we hear right off from the FMLN? I mean, we didn't
start hearing about it until a month later." Abrams, in other words,
was still trying to negotiate what became with the exhumation of the sacristy
unnegotiable, still trying to return discussion to the familiar question
of whether or not a massacre had actually occurred. Enders, when he talked
to Danner, had transcended this now inoperative line of attack, ascending
effortlessly to the big-picture argument against the existence of a massacre:
"Coming on top of everything else, El Mozote, if true, might have
destroyed the entire effort. Who knows? I certainly thought that when
I first heard about it." In other words it had been necessary to
deny the massacre because had there been a massacre the "effort"
would have become, again in Enders's word, "unfundable."

The effort did not become unfundable. The
effort instead became the most expensive attempt to support a foreign
government threatened by an insurgency since Vietnam.[2]
Progressively cruder interpretations of what had been the surgically precise
statements made by the embassy came to dominate, during the spring and
summer of 1982, discussion of this country's role in Central America.
By February 10 of that spring The Wall Street Journalwas noting editorially
that "extremists" in El Salvador had "learned long ago
the trick of dressing in military uniforms to confuse their victims."
(This appears to have been the source for Ronald Reagan's later assertion
that "communist operatives" were dressing in "freedom fighter
uniforms" to discredit the Nicaraguan contras.) Shrill excoriations
of Raymond Bonner, who necessarily had to be cast as having what George
Melloan of The Wall Street Journal called "a political orientation,"
became commonplace.

Bonner was a graduate of Stanford Law School, had been a prosecutor in
the San Francisco district attorney's office, and had served as a Marine
officer in Vietnam. The Marine major who went up to Morazï¿½n with Todd
Greentree, John McKay, had been with Bonner in Vietnam, where McKay lost
an eye. "We could not have said, 'My God, there's been a massacre,"'
McKay told Danner about the cable the embassy sent to Washington as a
report of his and Greentree's trip to Morazï¿½n. "But, truth be known,
the ambiguity of the cable that went out?in my own conscience I began
to question it. And then when I saw the New York Times piece, and the
picture, that really got me thinking. Bonner and I had gone to Quantico
together, went to Vietnam together." In the late summer of 1980,
at a time when Bonner had spent time in Bolivia and Guatemala but made
only a few short visits to El Salvador, he was asked his opinion of US
policy in El Salvador. "Ask me about Bolivia, or Guatemala, or any
country, I'll probably have an opinion," Bonner recalled having said.
"But El Salvador, boy, I just don't know. I guess we're doing the
right thing."[3]

Bonner, then, might have seemed an unlikely target for the campaign then
being mounted against him in Washington and New York. For those waging
this campaign (notably The Wall Street Journal), however, the question
of "political orientation" was answered once and for all in
August 1982, when the Times abruptly withdrew Bonner from Central America.
According to A.M. Rosenthal, then the executive editor of the Times, Bonner
was withdrawn because he "didn't know the techniques of weaving a
story together?. I brought him back because it seemed terribly unfair
to leave him there without training." Actually Bonner had spent a
good part of 1981 on the Metro desk at the Times, but Rosenthal suggested
that those who believed Bonner to have been withdrawn for reasons other
than "training" did so because they resented him, Rosenthal.
"I was an agent of change in the Times," he said, "and
a lot of people didn't like my politics."

In many ways this tends to beg the point, burying the issue as it does
in the self-referential. Whatever reason or reasons Rosenthal may have
had for withdrawing Bonner, it was the sheer fact of that withdrawal,
the fact of that apparent failure to back up a reporter who had put the
paper on the line with a story denied by the government, that spoke so
eloquently to those who wanted to discredit the reporting on El Mozote.
That the Times withdrew Bonner was seen, immediately and by wider numbers
of people than were actually knowledgeable about El Salvador or administration
policy, as "proof" that he had been wrong about El Mozote: as
recently as a few years ago it was possible to hear it casually said about
Bonner that the Times "had to pull him out," that he had "bought
into a massacre."

"For more than a year now we've been following the campaign that
we victimized former New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner,"
The Wall Street Journal noted editorially in 1993. "The excavation
of children's bones in Mozote is supposed to vindicate Mr. Bonner and
discredit what we said?we did not fire Mr. Bonner in the first place.
The New York Times did. Or, more precisely, after then-Managing
Editor A.M. Rosenthal undertook his own reporting visit to Salvador, it
pulled Mr. Bonner off the beat and back to New York, where he left the
paper." In defense of its own reasonableness, the Journal noted that
in its original 1982 attack on Bonner it had "offered not one word
of criticism of Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post."

Danner includes, among the documents reproduced at the end of The
Massacre at El Mozote, the full text of both Bonner's and Alma Guillermoprieto's
stories. There is no substantive difference between the two in either
the reporting or the qualifying of the story, but there were certain marginal
distinctions on which critics of Bonner could seize. Guillermoprieto referred
to herself as "this correspondent" and said that she had been
taken into Morazï¿½n by "the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front";
Bonner referred to himself as "a visitor who traveled through the
area with those who are fighting against the junta that now rules El Salvador,"
i.e., the Farabundo Martï¿½ Liberation Front. Guillermoprieto began: "Several
hundred civilians, including women and children, were taken from their
homes in and around this village and killed by Salvadoran Army troops
during a December offensive against leftist guerrillas, according to three
survivors who say they witnessed the alleged massacres." She then
proceeded to describe the bodies she herself had seen. Bonner began: "From
interviews with people who live in this small mountain village and surrounding
hamlets, it is clear that a massacre of major proportions occurred here
last month." He then proceeded to describe the bodies he himself
had seen. Bonner's statement is the less varnished of the two, but to
call it different is to resort to a point of journalistic convention so
narrowly defined as to be merely legalistic.

There seemed at the time at least two clear reasons that Bonner, not
Guillermoprieto, became the target of choice. One reason was that Bonner,
unlike Guillermoprieto, continued to report on a daily basis from El Salvador
and so, all through the spring and into the summer of 1982, remained a
stubborn mote in Deane Hinton's ability to project the situation as the
State Department wanted it projected. "I'm just afraid he's going
to get himself killed," I recall an embassy official saying about
Bonner during a lunch with Hinton in June of 1982; the tone here was the
macho swagger never entirely absent from American embassies on hardship
status. "That would be a tragedy." The other clear reason was
that Benjamin C. Bradlee and The Washington Post backed up their
reporter; A.M. Rosenthal and The New York Times did not.

The Mozote massacre occurred only six years
after most of us watched the helicopters lift off the roof of the Saigon
embassy and get pushed off the flight decks of the US fleet into the South
China Sea. There are now more than twice as many years between us and
Mozote than there were between Mozote and those helicopters. This is not
an insignificant time line, and suggests, in retrospect, a third reason
that Raymond Bonner's report from Morazï¿½n elicited an acrimony that Alma
Guillermoprieto's did not. Bonner was an American. Alma Guillermoprieto
was born in and was then living in Mexico, a fact that was in some way
understood to render her ineligible for casting as a member of what was
sometimes called "the adversary culture," the culture that was
construed as hostile to the interests of American business and the American
government, the culture that was even then drawing parallels between El
Salvador and Vietnam.

Certain parallels were inescapable, since El Salvador was seen, by both
the American military and the American policy community, as an opportunity
to "apply the lesson" of Vietnam. The counterinsurgency doctrine
that rationalized such operations as the 1981 sweep of Morazï¿½n was intended
as a "revision" of the failed counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam
(the revision for El Salvador placed a central emphasis on correcting
"root causes," or winning popular support by "democratizing"
Salvadoran society), yet it had come to sound dispiritingly the same.
The word "pacification" was in use, as was the phrase "third
force," usually in reference to Josï¿½ Napoleï¿½n Duarte.

"The only territory you want to hold is the six inches between the
ears of the campesino," Colonel John C. Waghelstein, who became commander
of the Milgroup not long after Mozote, said when he spoke at the American
Enterprise Institute in 1985 on "LIC [Low-Intensity Conflict] in
the Post Vietnam Period."[4] As late as 1986, in The Wall Street Journal,
an American military adviser was quoted describing a community event sponsored
by a Salvadoran army unit as "winning hearts and minds." The
event involved clowns, mariachis, and speeches from army officers calling
on peasants to reject the guerrillas. "This is low-intensity-conflict
doctrine in action," the adviser said.[5]

Again as in Vietnam, the doctrine was met with resistance on the part
of those charged with carrying it out. "Attempts to address root
causes during [this] period enjoyed less success than did efforts to stabilize
the military situation," four American military officers observed
in their 1988 American Military Policy in Small Wars: The Case of El
Salvador, the so-called "colonels' report" prepared for
the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis.

American officers recognized? [that] the government had to transform
itself into an institution perceived as effective, impartial, and committed
to bringing about genuine reform. Meaningful implementation of this concept
has eluded the Salvadorans and their American advisers.

In a 1991 Rand Institute report prepared for the Department of Defense,[6]
Benjamin C. Schwarz noted that "the greed and apparent tactical incompetence
of Salvadoran officers has so exhausted American experts posted to El
Salvador that all the individuals interviewed for this report who have
served there in the past two years believe that the Salvadoran military
does not wish to win the war because in so doing it would lose the American
aid that has enriched it for the past decade."

In San Salvador as in Saigon, this had long been accepted as one of many
taxing givens that made the posting so difficult to share with those who
were planning the effort in Washington. Deane Hinton, who would not talk
to Danner, emerges in The Massacre at El Mozote as the ultimate example
of the career foreign service officer trying to execute an extremely doubtful
policy in an even more doubtful situation. (In his role as the good soldier
of American foreign policy, Deane Hinton left El Salvador in 1983 for
Pakistan, a more remote but equally doubtful situation, and then returned
to Central America to mop up the debris left by the contra and then the
Panama efforts. Alma Guillermoprieto, whose work since El Mozote has been
especially acute on the immediacy with which Washington dreams become
Central and South American responsibilities, notes in her essential The
Heart That Bleeds that, as late as 1992 in Hinton's Panama embassy,
the preferred way to refer to the 1989 invasion was as "la liberaciï¿½n."[7])

"This is a suicide mission," an unidentified embassy official
in San Salvador said when Warren Hoge of The New York Times asked,
not long after Mozote, if assignment to El Salvador could advance a foreign
service career. "Someone's got to be nuts to be here. How many people
do you think profited from having worked in Vietnam?"[8]
What made the San Salvador embassy a suicide mission was, of course, the
certain knowledge that the facts of the situation would be less than welcome
at the other end of the cable traffic. "There was no secret about
who was doing the killing," Danner was told by Howard Lane, the public
affairs officer at the embassy at the time of El Mozote. "I mean,
you formed that view within forty-eight hours after arriving in the country,
and there was no secret at all about it?except, maybe, in the White House."

What Danner details in The Massacre at El Mozote is the process
by which actual eyewitness accounts (Bonner, Guillermoprieto) and photographs
(Meiselas) came to be discounted by large numbers of Americans for no
other reason than that the government, presenting no conflicting evidence,
referred to the accounts (the photographs seemed rather eerily not to
exist in anyone's argument) as describing an event that was intrinsically
unconfirmable, rendering the accounts by definition untrue. "Accurate
information," Enders said as he began his February 2, 1982, statement
on Capitol Hill. "I think we have all found out that is very hard
to establish." He continued, first questioning the possibility of
ever determining who, if indeed there had been "deaths," had
been responsible for them, then raising the ultimate question, the coup
de grï¿½ce question, the one that had to do with the true interests of those
who reported such deaths:

The responsibility for the overwhelming number of deaths is never legally
determined nor usually accounted for by clear or coherent evidence.
Seventy percent of the political murders known to our embassy were committed
by unknown assailants. And there is much special pleading going on also
in this.

What is especially striking about Enders, as he presents himself in The
Massacre at El Mozote, is his apparent inability to recognize any
contradiction between what he said in 1982 to the House Subcommittee on
Western Hemisphere Affairs and what he said a decade later to Danner.
Danner at one point asked Enders about a rumor, believed by a number of
prominent Salvadorans, that two American advisers had observed the Mozote
operation from a base camp below the Torola river. This was the answer
Enders gave: "Certainly, one of the issues I remember raising between
us and the Embassy was: Were there any American advisers on this sortie?
The Embassy made a great effort to talk to advisers who were with the
Atlacatl to try to find out the truth." Any admission of knowledge,
Enders conceded, "would have ruined those guys' careers?they would
have been cashiered. So no one's going to volunteer, 'Hey, I was up there."'
The effect of such a disclosure on administration efforts to continue
funding the war, Enders said, "would have been devastating. American
advisers with a unit that committed an atrocity? Devastating. Can you
imagine anything more corrosive of the entire military effort?"

Enders had recognized at the time, then, the existence of a "sortie,"
even the possibility of an "atrocity" (the atrocity if not the
sortie was in the subjunctive), and had raised the question of whether
there had been "American advisers" present. Yet what Enders
had said in 1982 was this: "?frankly, we do not have people who go
out with the units as advisers, you know. These are military trainers.
They stay behind." The idea that there was a difference between "advisers"
and "trainers," another of the many legalistic distinctions
at that time employed to rhetorical advantage, seems not to have been
consistently held even by Enders.

Danner describes what happened to the story of El Mozote during the days
and months after its initial disclosure as "a parable of the cold
war." It was that, and as such a parable Mozote is irresistibly legible,
but it was also something else. "There have also been many fewer
allegations of massacres during this reporting period than last,"
Thomas Enders was able to say in July 1982, when the question of certification
once again came before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. "This
may be in part," he said, still the loyalist but still careful, fewer
allegations of massacres, may be, in part, "because many earlier
reports proved to be fabricated or exaggerated."[9]

At the same hearing, Nestor Sanchez, then deputy assistant secretary
of defense for Inter-American affairs, was able to single out "the
first quick-reaction battalion trained by US instructors in El Salvador"
not only for "its tactical capability in fighting the guerrillas"
but also for "its humane treatment of the people."[10]
That was the Atlacatl. Just six years after Vietnam and in the face of
what was beginning to seem a markedly similar American engagement, Mozote,
by which we have come to mean not exactly the massacre itself but this
systematic obfuscation and prevarication that followed the disclosure
of the massacre, was the first evidence that we had emerged a people again
so yearning to accept the government version as to buy into a revision
of history in which those Americans who differed, those Americans who
for reasons of their "political orientation" would "fabricate"
reports of a massacre carried out by a unit noted for its "humane
treatment of the people," were once again our true, and only truly
sinister, enemy.

[9] Hearings and Markup
before the Committee on Foreign Affairs and its Subcommittee on Inter-American
Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, Second Session,
on HJ Res. 494, June 2 and 22; July 29; and August 3, 10, and 17, 1982,
p. 17.

[10] Hearings and Markup
before the Committee on Foreign Affairs and its Subcommittee on Inter-American
Affairs, p. 49.